Two weeks ago, I wrote about Daniel Mai’s video on writing your Emacs configuration as an Org file. He showed how to organize your configuration in a literate programming way. Now he has a second video that ties everything together by showing how to load the configuration in the Org file when Emacs starts.
The idea is to use init.el as a sort of boot loader that does a small bit of preliminary initialization and then loads the config by calling org-babel-load-file. The files are set up so that he can drop this small init.el and his Org configuration file onto a new machine and have it download all his packages. If you find yourself setting up new Emacs installations frequently, that can be a big time saver: just pull the two files from some repository, start Emacs, and everything gets taken care of for you. Very nice.
The video is just 5 minutes, 15 seconds so it’s easy to watch during a coffee break. As I said in my previous post on this series, if you’re thinking of refactoring your Emacs configuration, consider making it an Org file and using Mai’s technique to load it.